A N&N from Brussels Belgium where I am up in the middle of the night (again I wake up at 3AM!) with my sleep hours all screwed up. I am enjoying my week here nonetheless. I don't know quite what to make of Brussels. Some parts remind me quite a bit of Paris but there is this weird mix of "modern" glass buildings although the style is a bit "older" than such US buildings. I don't know, I'm jet lagged and probably making no sense. The (potential) customer we are visiting is actually quite large > 3,000 employees most in one large building and I have been working hard on a "High Level Technical Document." Its' certainly some BDUF but this is a large SaS type architecture across 3 data centers that has many Enterprise issues (levels of Failover, SLAs, SQL Server Hot Mirroring, Perimeter Zone Security, etc. to deal with and get right. Anyhow, the food is good and there is a lot of espresso-).

Architecture

• The Open Group (the TOGAF guys) has scheduled what appears to be an interesting conference on Enterprise Architecture and SOA in San Diego [via Architecture Blog]

Avalon/WCF

• Karsten gives an update on the North Face In Store Explorer WPF application that floored many of us at PDC05 and has now been deployed. He also reminds, "Note that the white paper written about this application is still relevant and worth reading.   The code samples all work just fine on the final bits and have some useful code as far as state management, image montages and a 3D carousel."
• My good friend and fellow Smart Client track speaker, Walt Ritscher has started a new WPF blog at http://wpfwonderland.wordpress.com  - Subscribed! Check out XAML to IL Explained Part 1,
WPF/e Example - Game of Life

WCF/Indigo/SOA

• Nicholas Allan has his best of 2006 (and what a year it was for him/them!). Also check out Zen Faults

Other

• Ted Neward has his predictions for 2007, of which I mostly agree with all of them but one of the best qualities of Ted is his fantastic sense of humor which leads to some classic lines. To wit: "NET: Thousands of developers will horribly abuse WPF in ways that can only be called nightmarish, thus once again proving the old adage that "just because you can doesn't mean you should" still holds"..."General: Somebody will attempt to use the phrase "Web 2.0" in a serious discussion, and I will be forced to kill them for attempting to use a vague term in a vain effort to sound intelligent.".."H.P. Lovecraft once suggested, loosely paraphrased, the the day Man understands the nature of the universe, he will either be driven into gibbering insanity, or flee back into ignorance in self-preservation. Ditto for the day Man reads the SOAP 1.2 spec and realizes that SOAP is, in fact, RESTful. " and "Windows: Microsoft will try, once again, to kill off the abomination that was called the Windows 95/98/Me line of operating systems, and will once again have to back off as industry outcries of protest (on behalf of little old ladies who are the only ones left running Windows 95/98/Me and probably haven't turned their machine on in months, at least not since the grandkids last visited) go ballistic. " Great stuff!
• Virtual PC 2007 RC is available for release

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